Posts Tagged ‘growth chart’

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia – also known as CHOP – is addressing a need that is 25 years in the making with a new research study focusing on the growth and development of children with Down Syndrome. The study, which is funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), brings together experts from the Hospital in growth and nutrition, Down syndrome (also called trisomy 21), and general pediatrics to develop new growth charts for children and young adults with Down syndrome.

Over the last couple of months, I have written a handful of posts that discuss children’s growth charts. According to an article in the medical journal Pediatrics that was released last week, understanding these charts is a challenge for most parents.

Every visit to your child’s doctor involves taking height and weight measurements. These measurements are used to plot a child’s growth over time and see where they fall relative to other children of their same age and gender and to make sure that they are growing as expected. The easiest way to track your child’s growth is simply to record the date that your doctor takes your child’s measurements and what those measurements are. This article offers tools and tips for tracking this information yourself.

In an earlier post, I discussed what growth charts mean and ways that you can use growth charts to monitor your child’s development. The CDC growth and BMI charts are the standard in doing this. They are age- and gender-specific and incorporate data from all races and ethnicities.

To provide an alternative what they consider to be a “lumping together” of all children, Halls.MD offers a collection of alternative growth charts that not only break children’s growth data down by age and gender, but also race and ethnicity.

Growth percentiles are the most commonly used method in the United States to assess a child’s size and growth patterns. Where your child’s measurements fall on the growth chart is not as important as whether they continue to grow along a similar percentile. For this reason, most pediatricians track children’s growth over time to see if there are significant changes in their expected growth pattern.